Have you heard Tim B's interview with Dreaming Dragonslayer? I've listened to it twice. Here's what Tim said that I can't stop thinking about (slight edits for clarity):
"With an RPG, you have to think, okay, the players are going to be moving through space— what is the experience of one person in this story? Whereas with a social matrix game, you can think more about the story as a whole.
Lull Astir started in my head as a D&D scenario. There’s this exiled revolutionary and he’s being protected by this monastery. The monastery doesn’t want to give him up, but if they don’t give him up, then there could be this big war.
And at first I was thinking: then I throw some adventurers in, right? And they have to go solve the problem. But I started to think: why are the adventurers here at all? Because the interesting conflict is not the conflict between the player characters and whatever monsters they’re going to fight in the dungeon. The interesting conflict is between these factions. And with a Matrix game, you just play as the factions.
I’m starting to worry that any scenario I might come up with for a dungeon crawler might be more interesting if I just let people play as the factions and skip the adventurers. I’m still trying to figure out: is there anywhere where adventurers come in for me that is fun and interesting still?"
He made me realize that “domain level” play is actually faction play. You're not just playing a more powerful individual— you're playing a faction and your character is the leader.
When I read about Matrix Games previously, it felt like silly imagination time. Play, but not a game. Empty somehow. Tim articulates it like this:
“I ran a Matrix game that was a Steven Spielberg mashup. I liked the format. I loved playing a scenario. But I didn’t quite like how—for lack of a better word—frivolous it all felt. I wanted there to be something more serious and more dramatic about it.
And I feel like that’s sort of where I’m heading. I described Lull Astir as kind of Shakespearean, it’s going for that sort of dramatic weight. The one playthrough I ran of it for the NSR camp ended up being a very tragic story, and I was very happy with that. The character who is under protection of this monastery ends up dying because he gets overconfident about his little revolutionary plans. And it felt very sad, and that’s kind of what I liked about it. You know, it’s this expression—I’m trying to express something through it."
It makes me want to (a) playtest Lull Astir with Tim (hello, Tim) and (b) formulate a scenario that could be a "bridge" for people (like me) who have only ever played adventure games.
What might that look like?
- Classic fantasy setting (understood by all - minimal explanation needed)
- Player Factions with unique goals to measure "success" and vector play
- An NPC adventuring party to emphasize the scale of the game ("You are the factions who send the adventuring party into the dungeon - you're not the adventuring party.")
What else?
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More on Matrix Games:
https://www.bastionland.com/2021/04/matrix-games-from-rpg-perspective.html
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